... so I use my private Pythagoras knowledge to predict that 8 astragali would have ...

120 x 11/8 = 165

... and 9 astragali ...

165 x 12/9 = 220

... and 10 astragali ..

220 x 13/10 = 286

... and 11 astragali ...

286 x 14/11 = 364

... and 12 astragali ...

364 x 15/12 = 455

... which all isn't proved by hand. But I think, that it would work.

Now it starts with the idea, that 1 astragali has 4 possibilities.

If I would use a die with 5 sides (it's possibly difficult to construct one) ...

... I guess, that it starts with 5 possibilities, and 2 dice of that sort would have 5 x 6/2 = 15 possibilities. And 3 dice of that sort would have 15 x 7/3 = 35 possibilities, and 4 dice of that sort would have 35 x 8/4 = 70 possibilities.

Let's see, if I can prove this for the last one: 4 dice with 5 vales a-b-c-d-e.

... and trivially 5x11 = 55.
And for the calculation of the possibilities you have 10 double appearances (1-1, 2-2, 3-3 etc) and 9x10 meetings of 2 different numbers (divided by 2, cause there are 2 ways "ab" and "ba") and 9x10/2 = 45.

Imagine two rings consisting of the numbers 1-10, which are arranged above each other.

... you naturally generate 10x10 = 100 pairs of numbers, each with the same probability. But as your mind is fixed on possibilities, you reduce the 100 to 55, as you count 1-2 as identical to 2-1, and also the other pairs, only not 1-1, 2-2, 3-3, 4-4 etc.. That's your personal counting trick. So you get a 55 instead the 100, but 10x10 is still a 100.

1-1 appears as often as 1-2 and as 2-1, all 3 have same probability. But as you count 1-2 and 2-1 as identical, the "combination of 1 and 2" appears twice and 1-1 only once.

In a throw of 6-sided dice the result 1-1-1 has the probability 1 : 216 (6x6x6), but 1-2-3 has the chances 1-2-3 and 1-3-2 and 2-1-3 and 2-3-1 and 3-2-1 and 3-1-2 and so the probability 6 : 216. And a value like 1-1-2 has 3 chances and a probability of 3 : 216.

Two 2-sided dice have 3 possibilities
Two 3-sided dice have 6 possibilities
Two 4-sided dice have 10 possibilities
Two 5-sided dice have 15 possibilities
Two 6-sided dice have 21 possibilities
Two 7-sided dice have 28 possibilities
Two 8-sided dice have 36 possibilities
Two 9-sided dice have 45 possibilities
Two 10-sided dice have 55 possibilities
Two 11-sided dice have 66 possibilities
Two 12-sided dice have 78 possibilities

Here is Moakley's earlier article, kindly supplied to me by Ross, which he got from the late Michael J. Hurst. I have converted it to a text file and corrected it by comparing it to the pdf. Some errors may remain.

BULLETIN OF
The New York Public Library
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
FEBRUARY 1956 NUMBER 2

The Tarot Trumps and Petrarch's Trionfi
Some Suggestions on Their Relationship
By GERTRUDE MOAKLEY
Cataloging Office, Circulation Department

STRANGEST of all playing cards are the Tarot cards of Italy and southern France. They are still used as a game in that part of Europe;(1) but in France and the English-speaking countries they have a more romantic
reputation. Occultists have persuaded themselves that there are mystic meanings in this pack. It consists of seventy-eight cards. Part of these are the suit cards, corresponding to the four suits of our familiar bridge deck. But there are four Court cards in each suit: king, queen, knight and page. And the signs of the suits are different; swords, cups, batons and coins, instead of our spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds. Besides the suit cards there are twenty=two special picture cards, each showing a different figure. One of these is a wild card, called Il Matto (Checkmate,(2) or Fool). The others are the trionfi (triumphs, or trumps), sometimes called atutti or atouts. (3) These trumps have fascinated the occultists.

The Tarot pack is not the only one that has these special trumps. The Minchiate pack of Florence has six wild cards and thirty-five trumps.
_____________ 1 The rules are given in Culbertson's Hoyle, by Ely Culbertson (New York, 1950) under "Tarock," p. 355-838, and also in Larousse du XXe siècle, under "Tarot," and the Enciclopedia Italiana, under "Giuoco: Tarocchi."
2 Most modern packs have French titles, and this card is Le Mat. For the Latin word mattum and its cognates in other languages see Murray, Harold J. R., History of Chess (Oxford, 1913), p. 159: 401-402. For a reply to Murray see "The Earliest Evidence of Chess in Western Literature," by Helena M. Gamer, in Speculum, Oct. 1954 (vol. 29), especially p. 736.
3 Most of the magazine articles written in English or French call them atouts, but the Enciclopedia italiana consistently calls them trionfi, and mentions an early card game of the same name.
[55]
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We seldom hear of this pack, although in some respects its trumps are closer than those of the Tarot to what I believe to be the common source of both packs. Another cousin of the Tarot is the Bolognese Tarot, which has fewer suit cards but the same number of trumps. The order of the trumps differ in one slight respect, however; the twentieth and twenty-first are transposed. A much more distant relation is the Tarot (or Tarock) of northern Europe. It has the same number of cards, divided in the same way: 56 suit cards, 22 trumps and a joker. But the designs of the trumps vary greatly from pack to pack, and the suit signs are different. The occultists have no patience with these packs.

Besides these packs of actual playing cards, there is a series of fifty engravings often called the "Tarot of Mantegna." When one mentions the Tarot to the art expert, it is this series he will think of. They are not actually by Mantegna (I believe they are supposed to be the work of Baldini). They are probably not playing cards either; they are too large and too thin. But they obviously derive from the Tarot trumps somehow. Like the trumps, they start with the lowest character, a beggar ( instead of the Tarot's Juggler) and proceed in ascending order, ending with the First Cause. This last picture has the four living creatures in its corners, like the last card of the Tarot trumps. There is nothing mysterious about the story these "Mantegna" trionfi tell. The whole series is more philosophical and dignified than the ordinary Tarot. It has the Pope, but the Popess of the Tarot is omitted. There is no Hanged Man, and no Fool standing mysteriously outside the whole series, For this very reason, perhaps, the "Tarot of Mantegna" has also been large neglected by occultists. (4)

The ordinary Italian Tarot is at least as old as the middle of the fifteenth century, but the occultist tradition dates only from 1781. (5) In that year French scholar, Antoine Court de Gebelin, published the eighth volume of
_____________4 The "Tarot of Mantegna" is considered in the following works, most of which were kindly suggested by Professor Erwin Panofsky: Die Tarocchi; Zwei Italienische Kupferstichfolgen, by the Graphische Gesellschaft (Berlin, 1910); "Ein Edles Geduldspiel," by Heinrich Brockhaus in Miscellanea di Storia dell'Arte in Onore di Igino Benvenuto Supino (Firenze, 1933), p. 397 416; the Gesammelte Schriften of Aby M. Warburg (Leipzig, 1932), vol. 1, p. 412, and numerous other references reached through the index at the end of vol. 2 under "Tarocchi"; and Catalog of Early Italian Engravings Preserved in the British Museum, by Arthur M. Hind (London 1910), p. 17-25.
5 The Tarot suit cards were sometimes used before 1781 for a simple kind of sortilege like the Book of Fate, which has also been claimed to be Egyptian in origin, although it contains a reference to Dick Whittington.

THE TAROT TRUMPS AND PETRARCH'S TRIONFI 57Monde Primitif. (6) It contains a chapter on the Tarot. In it he tells how he happened to see some ladies playing the game, and was struck with the 1dtires on the trump cards. He had seen Tarot cards in his early youth, but forgotten about them. Now, seeing them again, he felt that they had serious meaning.

Even in our own day, when so much more is known about the past, one shares this feeling on seeing the trumps for the first time. When the cards are laid out in sequence (in modern packs all but the wild card are numbered) they seem to be telling some mysterious story. The curtain is raised, so to say, by the Juggler. Then come powerful figures: Popess, Empress, Emperor and Pope. Gods and personified virtues follow, then the Hanged Man, Death, with the angel of Temperance, the Devil, and a burning Tower. Stars, the Moon and the Sun are next, and then the Last Judgment, followed by that enigmatic card called the World, a semi-nude woman dancing in the midst of the four living creatures, the symbols of the four Gospels.

Court de Gebelin had been studying things Egyptian, as well as anyone could at that time, and it seemed to him that the cards were Egyptian. He was convinced that they must be an ancient book, the Book of Thoth. This book, he said, must have been deliberately disguised as a game and given the ancestors of the Gypsies, many centuries ago, by ancient Egyptian priests, who trusted that a book in the form of a game would have a better chance of survival. It would surely be preserved in its original form until e wise man appeared who could decipher it. And now Court de Gebelin had done it! He read them backwards, and found in them the story of the seven ages of man. The Golden Age was represented by the cards for the World, the Last Judgment (really the Creation, he said), the heavenly bodies the blazing Tower, and the Devil, who of course put an end to the Golden Age, The next seven cards were the Silver Age, and the rest the Iron Age.

This romantic theory is quite unsound, as Arthur E. Waite has pointed out.In the first place, no twentieth-century Egyptologist has given it any support, and it is unlikely that the ancestors of the Gypsies lived in ancient Egypt, as Court de Gebelin assumed. Then, too, the designs of the cards and
____________7. Court de Gebelin, Antoine. Monde Primitif, vol. 8 (Paris, 1781). The chapter on the Tarot is on p. 365-410. A folded plate at the end of the volume shows the trumps as Court de Gebelin knew them, with a dancing Prudence instead of the Hanged Man.
8. Waite, Arthur Edward. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London, 1910; and published in the U.S. as The Illustrated Key to the Tarot, by L. W. De Laurence, (Chicago, 1918), p. 23-32 in the American edition. He gives a full and amusing account of the growth of the occultist tradition up to.the time he wrote. He believed, nevertheless, that the cards had an occult meaning, but he did not think that they were much earlier than the fifteenth century.

58 THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
their order have changed from time to time, so that we must discard the idea of the faithfully preserved codex. Most of all, it is significant that the decks of the cards aroused no curiosity among those who first played with them in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. A disguised Egyptian book, suddenly appearing in Europe, would surely have stimulated lively discussion. In fact there was great interest in Egyptian symbolism at just about the time the cards appeared. The discovery of Horapollo's Hieroglyphica in 1419 had stimulated this interest. (8) But Horapollo's designs are very different from those of the Tarot, and it is not until more than a century later that questions about the meaning of the Tarot trumps are recorded. We can only conclude that the designs were so familiar as to arouse no comment.

None of these considerations has put a stop to the occultist legends. Nor has their inconsistency with each other discouraged the invention of new ones. The Hebrew Kabbalah is now often associated with the trumps, and Gypsies, supposed by Court de Gebelin to be ignorant keepers of the Book of Thoth, have become its most respected interpreters in some quarters.

The first to take up Court de Gebelin's theory was Etteilla (Alliette); 1783, and he was followed by many others. In the twentieth century the most influential writers on the Tarot have been Papus (Gerard Encausse), whose The Tarot of the Bohemians is the occultist's basic text, and Arthur E. Waite with his Pictorial Key to the Tarot.

Traces of their influence may be found in novels and poetry, notably Charles Williams' mystical novel The Great Trumps, and T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. Jessie Weston took Tarot very seriously in her From Ritual to Romance, which Eliot mentions as the chief influence on his poem. From the tone of Miss Weston's book, or would gather that she belonged to some occultist group such as the Order of the Golden Dawn, to which the poet W. B. Yeats belonged for a while.

The occultist Tarot lore is still growing. In every occultist bookshop the are books about it, and new ones keep coming out. Two of the newer ones are worth looking: Le Tarot de Marseille, by Paul Marteau (in which all the attractive cards made by Grimaud are reproduced in full color), The Painted Caravan, by Basil Rakoczi (published at The Hague by L. J. C.
_____________8 Panofsky, Erwin. Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, 1955), p. 152. This book, and: same author's Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939) will be found invaluable by anyone who wants to pursue the subject of the Tarot symbolism further. Also indispensable are two books by Raimond van Marle: Iconographie de l'Art Profane au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance (La Haye 1931-32), especially vol. 2: "Allegories et Symboles" [http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9 ... /f11.image] and The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting (The Hague, 1923-28).
9 For Yeats' nerve-racking struggle with Aleister Crowley, see The Great Beast: the Life of Aleister Crowley, by John Symonds (New York, 1951), p. 20-34.

58 THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
[illustration] Six trump cards from the Visconti-Sforza set in The Morgan Library, by whose permission they arc here reproduced. The Lovers, the Car, the Last Judgment, the Hermit, Death and the Fool are shown.

THE TAROT TRUMPS AND PETRARCH'S TRIONFI 59
Boucher, 1954). Rakoczi has modified the designs of the trumps to suit himself, as many occultists have done. He has also added a design for T. S. Eliot's fictitious card, the Phoenician Sailor. In books published under Jungian auspices, rather uncritical references to the Tarot are beginning to appear. Such a book is The Great Mother, by Erich Neumann, published in English translation in 1955 as part of the Bollingen series. It contains a reference to the Tarot backed up by Rudolf Bernouilli's essay, "Die Zahlensymbolik des Tarotystems," which appeared in the Eranos-Jahrbuch (also a Jungian publication) for 1934. Bernouilli's authorities are not very impressive.

Even cataloguers of playing cards have given rather serious attention to Court de Gebelin's ideas. The two most useful catalogues are A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and other Cards in the British Museum, by William H. Willshire (entered in most library catalogues under the author heading “British Museum") and A History of Playing Cards and a Bibliography of Cards and Gaming, by Catherine P. Hargrave. Since no scholar has arisen to do for playing cards what Murray did for chess, the cataloguers have had to do the best they could, and their work has a strong tincture of Court de Gebelin. The anonymous cataloguer who described the Morgan Library's yold painted Tarots has followed the same line.

Before we go on to discuss the real meaning of the trumps, it might be well to give the location of some collections of playing cards easily accessible to New Yorkers. The great collection described by Miss Hargrave is unfortunately out of their reach. It is the property of the United States Playing Card Company, and is now on permanent loan to the Cincinnati Art Museum, being housed in its Print Department. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has two incomplete packs which must be Tarot cards (quite modern) and some very old uncut sheets of what look to me like Minchiate. The Cooper Union Museum has an incomplete pack of Minchiate. The Morgan Library has thirty-five fifteenth-century Tarot cards, some of them painted by Cicognara. Part of this set has been beautifully reproduced in full color in Connoisseur, March 1954, pages 54-60. Our own Library has a pack of the modem Tarots made by Grimaud in Paris, with the maker's name and the date 1930 on the two:of coins. It also has a pack of Tarots made in Brussels, which resembles German Tarock cards, though the suit signs are our own familiar spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds; and a pack of fortune-telling Tarots like Etteilla's. We may never know how the entire Tarot pack developed. The suit cards have grown out of the game of chess, or they may have come from the Middle East, as some people believed in the late fifteenth century. And if

60 THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
the origin of the suit cards is so hard to discover, will it not be even harder to make any sense out of those far more mysterious cards, the trumps?

Not when we once get on the right track. We have two valuable clues: their Italian name, trionfi, and the original absence of curiosity about their meaning, showing that it must have been taken for granted.

The word trionfi means triumphs as well as trumps (in fact, the English word trump is only another form of the word triumph). In the Italian Renassauce these trionfi, as revivals of the ancient Roman triumphs, became very popular. They were quite a different thing from the ancient triumph, however. That had been a strictly military celebration. Dressed in the regalia of Jupiter Capitolinus, the victor had ridden in a car drawn by four white horses. His captives were chained to his chariot wheels, and the processions often included other trophies, such as exotic animals brought from the conquered country. The trionfi kept this basic pattern, but blossomed out into something more like circus parades or Mardi Gras processions. They seem to have been an important part of the Carnival celebration. The triumphal car became a float, and the place of the human victor was given to some allegorical figure such as Fortune or Peace. (10) These triumphs became popular all over Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Francis Bacon in his Essays, assumes that they will play an important part in social life:

"You cannot," he says, "have a perfect palace, except you have two several sides; a side for the banquet . . . and a side for the household; the one for feasts and triumphs, and the other for dwelling . . . I would have on the side of the banquet, in front, one only goodly room above stairs, of some forty foot high; and under it, a room for a dressing or preparing place at times of triumphs." (11)

"These things are but toys," he says in another essay, "to come among such serious observations. But yet, since princes will have such things, it is better they should be graced with elegancy, than daubed with cost . . . Let the scenes abound with light, specially coloured and varied . . . The colours that shew best by candle-light are white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water green; and oes, or spangs, as they are of no great cost, so they are of most glory. As for rich embroidery, it is lost and not discerned ... Let antimasques not be long; they have been commonly of fools, satyrs, baboons, wild-men,
_______________10. cf. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (London, 1914), pt. v, chapter viii: The Festivals. cf. also Chartrou, Josephe. Les Entrées Solennelles et Triomphes a la Renaissance; and Weisbach, Werner. Trionfi (Berlin, 1919).
12. Bacon, Francis. The Essayes or Counsels, Civil & Moral (London and New York, 1925). Essay xxv: Of Building, p. 134.

The greatest artists of the time designed the arrangements for such festivals. At Milan, Leonardo da Vinci designed them for the festivals of the Duke. (13)

But long before the triumphs took the form of actual processions, they had been the theme of paintings and literary works, and I think we may connect e Tarot trumps with one of these, the poem by Petrarch entitled I Trionfi (The triumphs).

Petrarch was still working on this poem when he died in 1374, and for more than two centuries after his death it was the most popular of his works, (14) and next to Bible stories the theme used most often in illumination, tapestry, painted marriage-chests and birth-trays, pottery, enamel work, relief sculptures, and engravings. (15).

Petrarch's poetry became such a fad that people began to exaggerate about the strength of their devotion to it and the early date when it began. (16) Finally the fad became ridiculous. "By the close of the fourteenth century," says Burckhardt, (17) "the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of rse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle." But Petrarch was still popular, as we have noted, for the next two centuries, and one will sometimes see in
_____________12. Ibid., Essay xxxxvii: Of Masques and Triumphs, p. 115-116. This list of characters reminds me of the figures used on the playing cards of fifteenth-century Germany.
13 Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 417; and Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo (Roma, 1954- ), vol. 1, 359. So far only the first volume (A-Bar) of this encyclopedia has appeared. Forthcoming volumes should be useful on the subject of trionfi).
14 "Throughout the manuscript period the Triumphs were markedly more popular than the Canzoniere; of 213 14th-15th century MSS. listed by Narducci as containing one or both of the two works, some 85 contain the Triumphs alone, some 79 both Triumphs and Canzoniere, and only some 49 the Canzoniere alone." — Wilkins, Ernest H. The Making of the "Canzoniere," and other Petrarchan Studies (Roma, 1951), p. [379]. For the popularity of I Trionfi see also Masséna, Victor, prince d'Essling. Petrarque (Paris, 1902), p. 102, note 3. Hind, A. M., Catalogue of Early Italian Engravings (London? 1910), p. 10 (quoted in Harvard University. Fogg Museum of Art. A Loan Exhibition of Early Italian Engravings (Intaglio), (Cambridge, 1915), p. 51. On page 104 of the Fogg Museum work there is mentioned a "game of the Triumphs of Petrarch" as one of the entries in the Rosselli inventory, and the game is described as consisting of three pieces.
15 cf. Wilkins, op. cit., p. 217. He quotes an inscription by the owner of an illuminated copy of the poems, who said that he wanted to have his darling Petrarch beside him in bed and at table, and to live and die with it. He also claimed that he had had the copy made at a date (1370) which Wilkins calls "unreliable."
16. Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 159.

62 THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
portraits of the time the fat, elaborately tooled little book, a "Petrarchino,” in the hand of some melancholy young man. (18)

It is clear, then, that Petrarch's Trionfi not only has the same name as our cards, but that it was a poem so universally familiar that the cards could have alluded to the poem and been instantly recognized for what they were by anyone who saw them. Now let us compare the cards with illustrations of the poem. (19)

The poem celebrates six triumphs: the triumph of Cupid over gods and men, the triumph of Chastity over Cupid, the triumph of Death over Chastity, the triumph of Fame over Death, the triumph of Time over Fame, and the triumph of Eternity over Time.

Those who illustrated the poem paid very little attention to the text they were illustrating. In fact, Masséna suggests that they were following some lost commentary on the poem, rather than the poem itself. I wonder if this "commentary" was not some carnival procession remembered by the artists.

These illustrations usually show the triumphant Cupid as a naked boy, (20) riding on a car drawn by four white horses. He aims his arrows (or his darts) at his captives, who include Anthony and Cleopatra, Petrarch himself as the lover of Laura, Aristotle, Virgil, and a personage in ecclesiastical dress who is shown sometimes as wearing the tiara of the Pope. (21) This papal personage heads the other captives in the fifteenth-century manuscript copy of Petrarch's Rime owned by The New York Public Library. And he looks very papal indeed in another fifteenth-century Italian manuscript of which Max Jaffe has issued a reproduction, owned by the Library's Picture Collection. At the end of the procession in this picture is Aristotle being ridden by Phyllis, but Virgil in his basket (a much naughtier story) is not shown.
____________ 18 e, g. "Giovane con Petrarchino" by Lotto, reproduced in Berenson, Bernard, Lotto (Milano, 1955), plate 64.
19 Most of the illustrations will be found conveniently assembled in two books: Masséna, Victor; prince d'Essling. Pétrarque (Paris, 1902); and Reid, George William. Works of the Italian Engravers of the 15th Century, first series (London, 1884), which has only the engravings by Fra Filippo Lippi, but is very useful because it includes the text of a complete English translation of I Trionfi.
20 For Cupid see Panofsky's Studies in Iconology, chapter iv: "Blind Cupid."
21 A tempting conjecture is that the Pope in the Petrarchan illustrations, and the Tarot Popess and Pope, were meant as a deliberate anti-clerical witticism. Then, if anybody objected, they were not really the Pope and Popess, but Jupiter and Juno in old-fashioned clothes (see Seznec, Jean, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (New York, 1953), p. 94-95,162-165, and the illustration on p. 157). But I must not conceal the fact that Professor Panofsky has serious objections to this. He points out that in the "Mantegna Tarot" we have both the Pope and Jupiter, without any confusion of the two.

THE TAROT TRUMPS AND PETRARCH'S TRIONFI 63
Here, then, we have a group of figures corresponding to the first group of Tarot trumps, as they are usually numbered today (we must remember that the oldest Tarot trumps bear neither numbers nor names). The first trump, the Juggler, may be only the master of ceremonies, or he may represent one of the gods or rulers who have fallen captive to Cupid. The next six cards are certainly Cupid's captives: the Popess (replaced by Juno in most of the Tarot cards of southern France), (22) the Empress, the Emperor, the Pope (or Jupiter in southern France), and the Lovers with Cupid above, all correspond quite closely to the illustrations of the triumph of Cupid. How different from the dignified opening group of the “Tarot of Mantegna"! In this Cupid group we have plenty of "box-office" appeal: opportunities for ribald wisecracks and sentimental expressions of several kinds. No wonder Petrarch's poem was so popular!

Next comes the triumph of Chastity over Cupid. We may take the cards that represent the virtues as the companions of Chastity, and the card called the Car seems intended as part of this group. Even though the car is drawn by the white horses of Cupid (and not the unicorns of Chastity) the card follows the first group of virtues in the Minchiate sequence, and therefore seems to belong to that group rather than to the first one. Furthermore, in the oldest cards (23) the figure riding in the car is a long-robed woman or an armed warrior (as in the modern Tarot), not at all like the naked Cupid. The virtues are Justice, Strength, and Temperance (in modern packs displaced into the Death group). Nowadays the Hermit is placed in this group, but he is actually Father Time, the only remaining representative of the triumph of Time, as I hope to show a little further on. Another card belonging to the Chastity group is the Wheel of Fortune, with its four figures saying "Regnabo; regno; regnavi; sum sine regno." We know that the card belongs to this group because Fortune appears in some form in a few of the illustrations for this part of Petrarch's poem. She is probably there as one of the captives of tri-
_____________22 "Jupiter and Juno replace the usual Pape and Papesse in most of the tarots of southern France." — Hargrave, op. cit., p. 37 (illustrated). See also Linde, Antonius van der, Geschichte des Schachspiels (Berlin, 1874), vol. 2, p. 390. Linde rejects the idea that chess and cards are connected, but his list of the trumps begins: "1. Gaukler; 2. Juno (friiher Papstinn); 3. Kaiserin; 4. Kaiser; 5. Jupiter (friiher Papst) ...
23. Including the card in the Morgan Library's set. The long robe alone would not argue against her being Venus, and possibly in the oldest Tarot sets the first group of cards was thought of as the triumph of Venus.

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umphant virtue. Sometimes she is represented by tempest-tossed sailors, for "fortuna" can mean "tempest" in Italian. (24)

The third section of the poem is the triumph of Death over Chastity, commemorating Laura's death, supposedly in the Black Death of 1348. In the illustrations of the poem Death is an emaciated woman brandishing a scythe, and riding in a funeral car drawn by black oxen. In the sky above, angels. carry the souls of the blessed to Paradise, and devils carry the damned to Hell. This group is plainly represented in both Tarot and Minchiate packs by Death, the Devil, and the .burning Tower. In modem packs the Tower is struck by fire from heaven, but in the old cards it is a regular Hell-mouth emitting flames of its own. (These Hell-mouths were favorite features of Carnival processions, and other out-door performances. Once one of the burned right through a bridge). The Hanged Man must also belong to this group, for he has been called the Traitor. (25) He has also been called the Acrobat (see Linde's list of the trumps in footnote 22). In some Tarot packs he is not hanging by one ankle, but dancing on one foot, and if one turns the Hanged Man upside down he usually appears to be dancing. (26) This suggests that in actual carnival processions he was attached by one ankle to his framework, and tried to keep his balance by standing on top of it, poised on one foot. Occasionally he would lose his balance, and then he would appear as the Hanged Man, the traitor Judas. In the Minchiate pack he has a bag of
________________24 "Fortuna e tempesta di mare; e dicesi: fortuna di mare; il mare fa fortuna (quando comincia) e in fortune. (turbato gth tutto). E il Manzoni in modo assoluto: quando ingrossa ruggendo la fortuna. Dicon anco, una fortune di vento; ma sempre sulle acque. Il fortunale e piu rapido, non sempre con piu rovinosa calamita. Ne fanno l'accrescitivo fortunalone." — Tommaseo, Niccolo, Nuovo Dizionario de' Sinonimi della Lingua Italiana (Napoli, 1935), p. 1093. A footnote to this passage quotes Horace as calling Fortune "Te dominam acquorum." See also Patch, Howard R., The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Harvard University Press, 1927), p. 106-107.
25 cf. the British Museum catalogue mentioned above. It was common to paint traitors as hung by their feet. Vasari tells us that Andrea del Sarto refused to paint a group of traitors in this position for fear of being called "Andrea of the Hanged," as another Andrea had been called after painting the traitors who tried to kill Lorenzo the Magnificent. The tradition seems to have persisted; Mussolini and his mistress were hung by the feet after their ignominious deaths. A photograph in the New York Times Magazine for October 16, 1955, shows a bust of Eva Peron hung upside down after Peron's overthrow. Could this custom have begun when Cola di Rienzi's headless corpse was hanged by his murderers during Petrarch's lifetime?
26. Professor Panofsky writes me: "The dancing posture which he (as you rightly observe) assumes when the picture is turned upside down is a very good classical motif very frequent in Bacchic reliefs and vase paintings and assimilated by the Italian Renaissance at an early data and with great enthusiasm (see, for example, Pollaiuolo's frescoes at Arcetri, first connected, so far as I know, with those classical prototypes by F. Saxl, "Rinascimento dell'Antichita," Repertorium fur Kunstwissenschaft, 43 (1922), p. 220ff.) There would seem to be a strong possibility that some kind of mix-up is involved, especially since those dancing bacchantes often carry cymbals or timbrels in their hands that might easily be reinterpreted into bags."

THE TAROT TRUMPS AND PETRARCH'S TRIONFI 65
coins in each hand (the thirty pieces of silver?) If the carnival acrobat had these, the moment when he lost his balance would be the moment for a give-away show, unless he could manage to keep the bags right side up as he fell. This he seems to be doing in the so-called "Charles VI" pack. (27) The lines of his clothing show that he has only just lost his balance, but he has managed to turn his bags right side up, just as a coin appeared at the mouth of each one.

The triumph of Fame — of Laura's fame over her death — has dropped out of the Tarot sequence entirely. But we do find it in the Minchiate pack, here it is represented by one of the six wild cards, an angel blowing two trumpets at once, with the inscription “Fama Vola." It is also represented by the second group of virtues, the more heroic virtues that lead to Fame: Hope, Faith, Prudence and Charity. In the illustrations of the poem, Fame is usually blowing a trumpet with several mouths and one mouthpiece, and is accompanied by virtues, as well as the great men and women of the past.

The triumph of Time over Laura's fame is represented by one card only, the Hermit. As we have already noted, he is really Father Time. He appears in the Petrarchan illustrations riding on a car drawn by stags (in Mantegna's lovely version their branched horns harmonize with the leafless branches of the winter trees through which the car is making its way). He leans on two sticks, and has an hourglass. (28) In the Minchiate pack he still has the two sticks, the hourglass, and one of the stags. In the oldest Tarot cards, (29) he has the hourglass, but in modern packs the hourglass has become a lantern, and the original meaning of the card has been forgotten. It seems to have taken on the idea of old age rather than time, and in the Minchiate pack is so numbered as to be the first card of the Death group. There are other symbols of Time in both Tarot and Minchiate packs, but they must be considered part of the triumph of Eternity, since they appear in the Petrarchan illustrations as Eternity's captives. They are the Stars, the
__________________27 The cards once thought to be those painted for King Charles VI of France in 1392, but now believed to be part of a Venetian set painted much later. cf. Willshire, op. cit., pt. I, p. 19. These cards are far more like modern Minchiate cards than like modern Tarots, and I would not surprised if scholars decided some time that they actually are Minchiate cards. They are reproduced full-size in Jeux de Cartes Tarots et de Cartes Numérales du 14. au 18. Siecle, published by the Société des Bibliophiles Francais (Paris, 1844), and far less satisfactorily in Hargrave (op. cit., p. 32 and the plate facing p. 38). Masséna mentions them (op. cit., p. 130, note 4) as showing that the ideas of I Trionfi were already in the air when Petrarch began to write them, but Masséna accepted 1392 as the true date for the cards.
28 cf. Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology, chapter III: Father Time.
29 Including the card in the Morgan Library, although it has been described as a man carrying a lantern. I am convinced, after inspecting the card, that it is an hourglass.

66 THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
Moon, and the Sun, whose office as the measurers of Time becomes useless in the full light of Eternity. The Minchiate pack has a very elaborate sequence of cards here, including the elements of fire, water, earth and air, and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The Minchiate Star is the Star of the Wise Men, recalling the Epiphany processions of Milan, (30) and suggesting that there were similar processions in Florence, the home of the Minchiate cards.

The cards of the Last Judgment and the World show Eternity itself. In the Petrarchan illustrations there are trumpeting angels on the triumphal car, like the angel (or angels) in the card of the Last Judgment. The car is drawn either by the four Evangelists themselves, or by the four living creatures that symbolize them: the angel, ox, lion and eagle. In one illustration the Evangelists draw the car while the four creatures walk sedately ahead of them. So in the last trump card; the World, the four living creatures appear in the four corners. The dancing woman who is now the central figure of this card was not part of the design in the old painted cards. There is sometimes an angel, but no naked lady. She seems to have taken the angel's place when the original meaning of the card had been forgotten. Possibly she is the earth goddess who has survived as "Saint Bertha" in the Alpine country.(31)

Now let us go back and look at the sequence as a whole. Notice that we need not do much rearranging of the modern numbered cards to make them fit our theory. Only the ninth and fourteenth cards need to be displaced. Notice also that each succeeding trump is more virtuous or more powerful than those before it.

The Triumph of Cupid:
I.The Juggler
II.The Popess (or Juno)
III.The Empress, more virtuous than the Popess
IV. The Emperor, more powerful than his consort
V. The Pope (or Jupiter)
VI. The Lovers (Cupid as conqueror)
______________30. Showy affairs with the whole city as stage, a star and an angel moving about on a wire, and with apes and baboons in the procession that followed the Magi. See Cualvanei de la Flamma. Opusculum de Rebus. Gestis ab Axone, Luchino et Johanne Vicecomitibus, ab anno 1328 usque ad annum 1341, chapter xxviii: De Festo Trium Regum. (in Muratori, L. A. Regum ltalicarum Scriptores, v. 12, pt. 4, p. 22). I spent many hours searching through Muratori and other collections of old Italian chronicles, hoping to find a record of some actual procession based on Petrarch's Trionfi. I found nothing, but the literature is so immense that a scholar trained in its use may yet find something. All I got was an impression that the trionfi may have been at first connected with the processions that began the medieval tournaments. The famous palio of Siena bears this out. cf. Toor, Frances. Festivals and Folkways of Italy (New York, 1953), p. 295.
31 Hastings, James, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 3 (New York, 1951), p. 228, art. "Carnival."

The Triumph of Death:
XII. The Hanged Man
XIII. Death
XV. The Devil
XVI. The Tower

The Triumph of Fame (in the Minchiate pack only)

The Triumph of Time:
IX. The Hermit (Father Time)

The Triumph of Eternity:
XVII. The Stars
XVIII. The Moon
XIX. The Sun
XX. The Last Judgment
XXI. The World (22)

Fool, or Checkmate (Not actually part of the procession)

This last card, the Fool or Checkmate, may be Lent, which checkmates the Carnival (33) in which the triumphal floats appeared. At the end of the Carnival there is usually some ceremony of killing or burying the Carnival. Sometimes there is a mock trial, when the Carnival is accused of having kept people up late, made them drunk, and caused all kinds of disorder. The figure of Lent sometimes goes along with the judges and executioners, to see that Carnival gets his just deserts. The Foal in the Morgan Library's set has some striking resemblances to this figure. He is dressed in rags, and has seven feathers in his hair, recalling the Italian custom of attaching seven
_____________ 32 Called "EI mondo ave dio padre" in one old record. cf. Hargrave, op. cit., p. 227. 33. There seems to be a special connection between gaming and the Carnival. Gaming was prohibited in fourteenth-century Italian towns except at Christmas time (é Archivio Storico Italiano, 4. ser., t. xviii (1886), p. 28-29) from the custom of allowing gaming at the Saturnalia, and the Saturnalia is generally considered to be an ancestor of the Carnival.

68 THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
feathers to "the Lent." At the end of each week in Lent one feather was pulled out, and just before Easter the "Lent" itself was destroyed. (34)

The probability that the Tarot trumps are closely connected with Petrarch's poem will strike one with special force if one considers it after looking for traces of the history and meaning of the cards in the history and symbolism of medieval and Renaissance alchemy, magic, and witcheraft, (35) or in other literary works of the time. (36) A comparison of the cards with these other sources leaves us baffled. They do not give us the plot of the story the trumps seem to be telling. It is only when we come to Petrarch's Trionfi that we find something like this plot.

And once we have adopted the hypothesis, other details help to corroborate it. We find that it was for Petrarch's patrons, the Visconti family, that some of the earliest cards were painted. Then, too, it is in Italy and southern France, where Petrareh lived, that the cards have persisted the longest and seem most at home.

Perhaps we may conclude, then, that the Tarot trumps appeared first in Italy, and that they are meant to represent a Carnival procession telling the story of Petrarch's love for Laura in allegorical form. It is ironic that the hard-headed Petrarch should have started something which has ended in the occultist bookshops. Superstition never had a deadlier foe than this great poet, who has been called the father of humanism. He disapproved of fortune-telling, and argued his friends out of listening to the persuasions of
_______________34 Frazer, Sir James G. The Golden Bough, pt. III: The Dying God (London, 1951), p. 244-245. The accounts of the death and burial of the Carnival are in the same chapter. At the mock trial of the Carnival figure, Caramantran, Lent marches to the trial at the head of the procession, with the judge and barristers (an indication that the first of the Tarot trumps may have originally been a judge). I wonder whether some of the customs Frazer describes may not be vestiges of the triomfi. He remarks himself: "The very abstractness of the names [Carnival, Death, and Summer] bespeaks a modem origin; for the personification of times and seasons like the Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is not primitive." This is not to deny that the Carnival itself harks back to the Saturnalia, or that the killing of the Carnival reflects the killing of the Saturnalian king after his short reign. If we are to find mystical meanings in the Tarot, it is here we might look. Robert Graves' The White Goddess and Watch the North Wind Rise might be read with this in mind, and on the mystical and cultural meaning of play in general see Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga (London, 1949; recently issued in the United States by Beacon Press as a paperback), and Behold the Spirit, by Alan W. Watts (London, 1947), p. 174-184 and 220.
35 The modern witch coven sometimes adopts the Tarot, but that is another story. cf. Witchcraft Today (New York, 1955), by Gerald Gardner, "member of one of the ancient covens." I suspect his coven is no more ancient than Aleister Crowley. On medieval witchcraft see Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, edited by Henry C. Lea (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939).
36 As William M. Seabnry did in his The Tarot Cards and Dante's Divine Comedy (New York, privately printed, 1951).

THE TAROT TRUMPS AND PETRARCH'S TRIONFI 69
fanatics. Perhaps we owe it to his memory to establish the Tarot trumps or what they really are. Let us hope some art historian will become interested the subject and give us the whole story. (37)

[illustration] The Hanged Man From the so-called Charles VI set of fifteenth-century cards.
___________ 37 Such a scholar would be able to follow up a clue kindly given me by Dr. Alfred L. Hall-Quest: that the Tarot pack may have some connection with the mnemonic texts used in medieval universities. A similar clue is a footnote, in Burckhardt (op. cit., p. 409, note 1): "About the year 970 Bishop Wibold of Cambray recommended to his clergy, instead of dice, a sort of spiritual bezique, with fifty-six [the exact number of the Tarot suit cards] abstract names represented by as many combinations of cards. — 'Gesta Episcopori Cameracens.' in Mon. Germ, SS. vii., p. 433." As to why the number of the trumps is twenty-one, there is the fact that two six-sided dice yield twenty-one possible combinations, for each of which there is a special Chinese name. cf. Culin, Stewart, Chess and Playing Cards (Washington, 1898), p. 833. The string of Spanish lottery balls shown on p. 906 of this book might be compared with the siring of balls held by the Juggler in the "Charles VI” cards.

In a couple of ways I actually like the 1956 application of I Trionfi better than the 1966. First, the Bagatto ("Juggler") is not imagined as the Carnival King sitting down to his last meal before his trial and death, but rather as a kind of master of ceremonies for the procession; this suits him better. Second, the Chariot card is explicitly identified with the Triumph of Chastity, with the virtues as companions. In the 1966 book that wasn't there. Instead the whole tableau of Temperance-Fortitude-Chariot-Love was simply a Triumph of Love. Third, Time is clearly there, as the Hunchback. I'm not sure that was so clear in the book.

On the other hand, the association of Cups with Temperance, Batons with Fortitude, Coins with the Wheel of Fortune and Prudence, and Swords with Justice, is not yet there. Some may see that as a good thing. I do not. Perhaps she excluded it because it has nothing to do with I Trionfi, and the article was already prety long.

In 2011, Ross tells me, he pointed Michael (Hurst) to a certain web-page, that of the "Erwin Panofsky Papers", at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/erwi ... nformation. In particular to "Box 8, reels 2117-2118 (a little past half-way down)." This is correspondence that Panofsky saved between him and Gertrude Moakley.

It is from this material that Michael got his quotes from Panofsky in his review of her work. Michael sent Ross jpgs of what was of interest. Ross sent the jpg's to me, and for my part I couldn't resist transcribing them, with some help from an online OCR program, so as to put them here. The jpg files are scans of Moakley's originals and Panofsky's carbons. You can tell which are which because the typing is very clear and sharp for Moakley, whereas that for Panofsky is quite blurred (causing many problems for the OCR program, I should add).

The correspondence is quite charming, and Panofsky does bring up a few substantive points worth discussing further. In this post I am just including the material leading up to and immediately following the publication of Moakley's 1956 article. The comments in brackets are mine, mostly giving the scan number given to each item being transcribed. I assume these are Michael's numbers, but since there are gaps, they might be the Smithsonian's.

In another post I will put the material concerning her book, which goes from Sept. 1956 to March of 1967--a year before Panofsky's death.

[scan 0001]

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
FIFTH AVENUE AND 42ND ST.
NEW YORK 18, N.Y.

Cataloging Office, Room 100
October 25, 1955

Professor Erwin Panofsky
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

Dear Professor Panofsky,

For the last three years, as a “hobby,” I have been trying to discover what I think you call the "iconography" of the Tarot trump cards. I am not an art expert at all, and do not even work in the Art Department of our Library. At first I thought I would find the answer in some book, and that it would be good practice in simple research, as well as an amusement.

However, I have found that nobody except occultists seems to have bothered much about these cards. So I have had to satisfy my curiosity as wall as I could, and now I am pretty much convinced that the cards allude to Petrarca's poem, I Trionfi, which was very popular about the time the cards first appeared (in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century).

I have written a little article about this for our Library's Bulletin, and the editor is willing to print it. However, we would both be so grateful if you would read it first, and let us know where you think the argument is weak or wrong. Mr. Karl Kup, of our staff, has read it, but feels he does not know enough about it to judge. Mr. Plummer, of the Morgan Library, suggested that you would be the best person to consult, but I hesitated to approach you until I read your delightful book, "Meaning in the Visual Arts,” and felt it was the kind of thing that might interest you.

Will you be so good as to let me know whether I may send you the article? It is eight pages long, typed double-space on regular typewriter paper, and I have tried to make it as readable as possible.

Yours sincerely,

Gertrude Moakley
Assistant in Cataloging Office

[scan 0002]
October 27, 1955
Miss Gertrude Moakley
Assistant in Cataloging Office
New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
New York 18, N. Y.

Dear Miss Moakley

Many thanks for your letter of October 25. I fully understand your interest in the Tarot cards and would be the first to welcome a good analysis of their contents. But I personally regret to say that I knows so little about this particular aspect of Renaissance iconography that I could hardly take upon myself the responsibility of passing Judgment on what you have to say. I should be very glad to look at your article for my own amusement and instruction, but I should not dare to pass judgment upon its value.

So, if this is all right with you send it along by all means. But in the meantime I should like to say that there have been, after all, some rather serious studies about the problem. The great edition of the two Italian series in the Chalcographical Society, of course, is mainly interested in style and dating. But some rather interesting obiter dicta can be found in A. Warburg’s Gessammelte Schriften, Berlin and Leipzig, 1932 (see Index), and a rather good article (at least I thought so) by H. Brockhaus is found in the Miscellanee di Storia d’Arte in onore di I. B. Supino, Florence, 1933, p. 397 ff. In all probability you know it, but I should like to mention it because. you say that you could find "nobody except occultists," in your quest for authors interested in the subject.

With many thanks for your kind words about my little book,

Sincerely yours,

Erwin Panofsky

[scan 0004, undated; scan 0003, of Oct. 31, seems from the content to follow this one]
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
FIFTH AVENUE AND 42ND ST.
NEW YORK 18, N.Y.
Cataloguing Office, Room 100

Professor Erwin Panofsky
The Institute for Advanced Study
School of Historical Studies
Princeton, New Jersey

Dear Professor Panofsky,

Thank you very much for consenting to read my Tarot article, and for replying so promptly. As you see, it has grown to seventeen pages. This is because, after reading more of your talks, I felt like the Queen of Sheba in the presence of Solomon, and gave up entirely the idea of writing a series of articles on each of the trumps. I realise now that an art historian could do it much better, and that I should content myself with this one article. So I have put everything I dare to say into it, including all the things I was saving for the rest of the series.

If you ever want to write a book on the Tarot yourself, I would be very glad to turn over to you all my notes and bibliographical references, for what they may be worth to you.

I should not have asked you to point out the weaknesses in the argument. Of course it is a weak little thing, and must remain so. But since the Library is to print it in its Bulletin, I would be pleased if you catch any glaring errors you happen to notice.

I am most grateful to you for your kindness. Under separate cover I am sending some pictures (mostly borrowed from our Library's Picture Collection) which may help elucidate the argument. I hoped to send photographs of the sixteen trumps owned by the Morgan Library (they think they have only fifteen, but I am sure the card they all the Queen of Staves is really the Empress). But their photographer is on vacation, so I could not get them in tine.

Yours sincerely,

Gertrude Moakley
Assistant in Cataloging Office

[scan 0003]
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
FIFTH AVENUE AND 42ND ST.
NEW YORK 18, N.Y.
Cataloging Office, Room 100
October 31, 1955

Professor Erwin Panofsky
The Institute for Advanced Study
School of Historical Studies
Princeton New Jersey

Dear Professor Panofsky,

On reading over the carbon copy of the letter I have just mailed to you with my manuscript, I blush to see that I have said something that sounds like an offer to sell you my notes and bibliography. Heaven forbid. (When I said "for what they may be worth to you" I meant "if you think they would be of any use to you.") If you should ever decide you want to write on the Tarot, I will gladly send them all to you if you want them, and find ample reward in the pride of having made a small contribution to the magnificent book you could write on it. Thank you for the three books you mentioned. They reminded me that I must make some mention of the so-called "Tarot of Mantegna," though I thought I had better not discuss it at all. The Brockhaus article and the Warburg book I did not know at all.

Sincerely yours,
Gertrude Moakley

[scans 0005 and 0006: a 2 page letter]
November 2, 1955
Miss Gertrude Moakley
Cataloging Office Room 100
The New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
New York 18, N. Y.

Dear Miss Moakley,

Many thanks for your letter of October 31 and your article, which I have read with great interest and which I herewith return.

So far as I can see, you have made some excellent points, and the mighty goddess Etymology is on your side. If I may make a suggestion--which, however, if accepted, would further increase the length of your essay—it would be the following. For people entirely unfamiliar with card games, such as myself, the whole discussion is somewhat hard to follow, because such uninstructed persons do not exactly know the specific meaning of those technical expressions as suits, trumps, etc. I for one have no idea what the modern Tarot cards look like and in what way they differ from those you talk about. Furthermore, and this applies unsocially to art history, only a few of us have ever investigated the differences that exist between the hand-painted cards such as the set in the Morgan Library, the engraved Northern playing cards such as the set produced by the master known as the Master of the Playing Cards (a set which seems to consist mostly of wild men and women, flowers and animals) and the famous “Mantegna” series. If your article is meant to be understood by such naive creatures as myself, it seems to me imperative, first, to define your terms and, quite specifically, to discuss a little bit the relationship between the painted sets of the fifteenth century me the “Mantegna” series. As for the latter (which may be quite an exceptional case that, as you say, may not even have been a set of playing cards in the technical sense) the situation is certainly worth clarifying. It seems to be an established fact that this “Mantegna” series incorporates the entire encyclopaedia tradition of the Middle Ages (see especially the article by Schlosser quoted in Warburg, I, p. 412). Here you have all the classical gods as such, without any misunderstanding and in part portrayed after quite recent discoveries (for instance, Mercury), all the Muses with the special refinement that Thalia, the Muse of the Earth, is not correlated with one of the celestial spheres, so that the ninth and highest of these could be allocated to the primum mobile, yet you have also the various "estates of man” (so that if the pope were really derived from Jupiter, as you assume, a pseudo-Jupiter would co-exist with the real Jupiter, who forms part of the pagan pantheon.

In short, what I think you should do is, first, to explain how a modern Tarot pack looks; second, to give a brief survey of the hand-painted sets which, so far as I can see, form the main subject of your investigation; third, to discuss, however briefly, the relation between these hand-painted sets and the Northern [start p. 2] playing cards on the one hand and the “Mantegna” series on the other. I am convinced that these problems have already been discussed in tho technical literature on card games whioh you know so well, but the uninstructed reader who knows the material only from the art-historical point of view—or, for that matter, from no point of view at all—will feel somewhat helpless when reading your article and will be bothered by the questions mentioned above.

In the hope that you will take these suggestions In the spirit in which they are given, I am,

Your letter of October 31 crossed mine of November 2, so that I have nothing to add except that I never misunderstood your intentions for a second. I do not plan, however, to do anything about the Tarot cards in the foreseeable future, which in my case is not too long.

A look at your illustrations, which I herewith return, confirms my opinion that, in order to be understandable to the uninitiated, you cannot very well evade the tedious task of informing him about the relationship between the various types or series of playing cards. It would seem that there is so much in common between the material you deal with end the “Mantegna” set that the two things cannot very well be separated even though their interpenetration may complicate matters in a most disagreeable manner. On looking at your “hanged man" it seems to me that the dancing posture which he (as you rightly observe) assumes when the picture is turned upside down is a very good classical motif very frequent in Bacchic relief and vase painting, and assimilated by the Italian Renaissance at an early date and with great enthusiasm (see, for example Pollaiuolo's frescoes at Arcetri, first connected, so far as I know, with those classical prototypes by F. Saxl, “Rinascimento del Antichita," Repertorium fur Kunstwissenschaft, p. 42, There would seem to be a strong possibility that some kind of mix-up is involved, especially since those dancing bacchantes often carry cymbals or timbrels in their hand, that might easily be reinterpreted into bags.

With all good wishes for the progress of your studies,

Sincerely yours,

Erwin Panofsky

[0008, note, perhaps accompanying a letter. Someone wrote “1955?”, I would think not Moakley]

TAROT: 1955? This is for you to keep if you like. I have a carbon copy.
Bernoulli, Rudolf. Zahlensymbolik des Tarotsystems. (Eranos-Jahrbuch, 1934 (Zurich, 1935), pp 397-415 (cited in The Great Mother, by Erich Neumann (New York 1957, p 210)

[My, mikeh's, rough translation: The doubling of the 21 leads to 42 and thus the perspective is opened to the ... 42 Books of Thoth. Each figure and its image would then each symbolize 2 books of Thoth. On the number 0, which bears the image of the fool, then none of the books is omitted ... (p.339)

"Now, however, the image and number system of the Tarot is also related to the Kabbalah, and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet are occasionally found on the 22 picture cards ... P. 400)

The attached figures [plates facing pp. 404, 400, 410, showing all the trumps), the earliest tarot pack known to me, which has the stereotypical images as they are still given today. It was published by Pierre Nademié in Dijon in 1709. It is the property of the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. The partly misleading inscriptions, as well as the clothing of the Symbols, should not be back more than in the 17th century. Some fragments have been preserved from earlier packs, some of which date back to the 14th century."]

If by this last he means the so-called “Charles VI" card., he must be wrong, as they seem to be 15th century really, and the cards in the Morgan Library are part of a complete set, the rest of which are somewhere in Italy. They are probably as old as the “Charles VI” cards.

[Note by mikeh: in a post-1956 letter she corrects herself to say that the deck at the Morgan is not, even when the cards in Italy are taken into account, a complete set.]

[scan 0009]
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
FIFTH AVENUE AND 42ND ST.
NEW YORK 18, N.Y.
Cataloging Office, Room 100
November 4, 1955

Professor Erwin Panofsky
School of Historical Studies.
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey

Dear Professor Panofsky,

Thank you so much for returning my manuscript so promptly, and for your kind words about it. Like most people who ask for advice, I shall probably not follow most of yours. This is because our Bulletin is used only as a last resort by people who have already found all the books an a subject they are interested in, and have come to the Bulletin while they are going. through the periodical indexes. It is a way ot putting on permanent record the bits of special knowledge our librarians happen to have. So I don't think I'll enlarge the article. Besides, it would take more training than I have to do it properly.

But I am using your letter to persuade the editor that he ought to illustrate the article profusely. I'm afraid he won't, though.

May I quote what you have said in your letter about the “Mantegna” Series, from “it seems an established fact" through “primum mobile.” (and so suppressing your objections about Jupiter and the Pope, as I am inclined to be stubborn about that)? I would add this passage to the footnote containing the bibliographical reference about the “Mantegna Tarot."

I am most grateful to you for taking the time to read and criticize my article, and if I can ever reciprocate by doing any errand for you here, I hope you will not hesitate to call on me. In a few weeks our department will move out of this building into the new Donnell Library on Fifty-third Street, so that would be the address to note down.

Yours sincerely,
Gertrude Moakley

[scan 012, number out of place]
November 7, 1955
Miss Gertrude Moakley
Cataloging Office, Room 100
New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
New York 18, N. Y.

Dear Miss Moakley,

Many thanks for your letter of November 4. I feel that, if you want to quote from my letter at all, you should not omit the parenthesis, which does, I feel, pose a problem. You are quite free to be as “stubborn” as you like, but then you should say so.

With all good wishes,

Very sincerely yours,

Erwin Panofsky

[scan 0010]
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
FIFTH AVENUE AND 42ND ST.
NEW YORK 18, N.Y.
Cataloging Office, Room 100
November 10, 1955

Professor Irwin Panofsky
School of Historical Studies
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey

Dear Professor Panofsky,

Of course it was outrageous of me to ask if I might quote you and omit the real point of the quotation. My only excuse is the haste in which I have had to work on this. Afterward I realised the real point of what you had said: that by 1400 artists knew better than to show the pagan gods in the old late-medieval way. Yet the Tarot Popess and Pope must have been somehow connected with Juno and Jupiter, since some packs have those figures in their place (Antonius van der Linde mentions this too, in his Geschichte des Schachspiele (Berlin, 1974), vol. 2 p. 390). I’m going to say I wonder if it wasn't an anti-clerical witticism to show the Pope. and Pope as Cupid's captives, with the excuse that they were really Juno and Jupiter.

I'm going to take your other advice, too, and put in a paragraph near the beginning of the article about the “Mantegna Tarot" and other cards like the Tarot (the German Tarock, which also has 56 suit cards, 21 trumps, and a joker). What you say about the Hanged Man and the Bacchic reliefs is most interesting, and I assume I may quote that whole paragraph unless I hear from you to the contrary. Thank you so much for returning the pictures so quickly, before I could begin to worry about them. I enclose some stamps to make up for the extra postage on them. I am deeply grateful for your generous help.

Many thanks for your letter of November 10, the stamps (which really would not have been necessary), and the copy of the Staff News, normally inaccessible to the hoi polloi.

Concerning the problem of the pagan gods and goddesses in the “Mantegna” series, the problem is not quite so simple as you stated in your letter—though it is, of course, impossible for you to go into the matter right now. While the image of Mercury was devised on the basis of new archeological discoveries (and perhaps for this very reason had tremendous influence all over the place, being copied not only in woodcuts but also in the wood carvings decorating, for example, German houses), the representation of Jupiter enthroned on a rainbow is still pretty mediaeval; and this again appealed to a Magdeburg printer of as early as about 1497 who included in one of his publications a copy in woodcut of this particular print. Be that as it may, the fact remains that, when the “Mantegna” series was devised, the artist made a very strict distinction between the suits of the pagan gods and the series of human estates to which the pope ad the popess belong.

That the Lions were pleased by my complimentary remarks fills me with gratification. I can imagine that their expression of supercilious boredom, aggravated by the sight of so many parades, is now mitigated by a slight but benevolent grin.

With all good wishes,

Sincerely yours,

Erwin Panofsky

[0013-0017 are notes about a certain Guillaume de Vienne, about whom Panofsky apparently had asked for some information, not connected with the tarot. Scans 0018 and 0019 are two typewritten pages of her article, with 0019 the part with her quotation from Panofsky. They are almost identical to what appears in the published article. (All I found different in the published version was the substitution of "the Library's Picture Collection" for "our Picture Collection" and the omission of the word "even" before the phrase "shown sometimes as wearing the tiara of the Pope.") On the top of that page Moakley writes, in handwriting: "This is a copy of the two pages on the Pope, Jupiter and Juno, and the Popess. (need not be returned) I will let the Editor have your letters so as not to hide your judgments from him." Then toward the bottom, after six or seven lines of white space: "I have left open about this much space here, in case you want to add more." ]

[19]
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
FIFTH AVENUE AND 42ND ST.
NEW YORK 18, N.Y.
Cataloging Office, Room 100
November 19, 1955

Professor Erwin Panofsky
School of Historical Studies
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey

Dear Professor Panofsky,

I have done some more searching for Guillaume de Vienne, and enclose my findings on slips. If I have time before they move us up to Fifty-third Street I will look him up in the book, about Burgundy in the stacks. After the move I am not sure when they will let me get into the stacks again.

I suppose you know about the National Union Catalog and the services it provides, but if not, this is its address:

Union Catalog Division
The Library of Congress
Washington 25, D. C.

The major libraries of the United States report their acquisitions to this catalog, so that it can tell you which libraries own a book you want. In addition to this, it conducts a (weekly?) poll of these libraries for books requested which are not recorded in the Union Catalog. And of course once you know what library has the book, you can often arrange for your own Library to borrow it for you (free) there (not from ours, unfortunately, as the Reference Department can lend only to the Supreme Court end the United Nations).

It has been a pleasure to conduct this little search for you. If you ever have another question I can help with and are in no great hurry for the answer (for this move uptown will'slow me down dreadfully) I shall be delighted to do so.

I have been thinking over what you have said about Jupiter and the Pope, and have given in almost entirely. I have called the chief of Cupid's captives "a personage in ecclesiastical dress who is even shown sometimes as wearing the tiara of the Pope.” Then in a footnote, I hazarded my guess, backed up by the reference to Sesnec (p. 94-95, 162-165 and 157) and then said: “But I must not conceal the fact that Professor Panofsky has serious objections to this. He points out that in the ‘Mantegna’ Tarot we have both the Pope and Jupiter, without any confusion of the two." That should be enough to suggest that a serious writer on the subject had better consult you on this point. The only reason I remain as pig-headed about it as I am is this: (1) That business of the Pope and Popess suddenly becoming Jupiter and Juno in the Tarots of Southern France, (2) it would make a carnival procession so such more fun if the Pope were not simply the Pope, but hinted at being someone else. Where the "Mantegna" trionfi are dignified end educational, the playing-card trionfi are full of fun, sentimentality, and ribaldry. [The next sentence handwritten.] And they tell Petrarch’s story, while the “Mantegna” don’t. Many, many thanks to you.
Gertrude Moakley

Many thanks for a number of communications too numerous to be referred to by date. I am very touched by the great efforts you and your associates have spent on the birth date of Guillaume de Vienne and hope that ultimately something will turn up, although the question is by no means vital. The “Guillaume, seigneur de Chateauvillain,” who was supplied by your division of genealogy, however, is certainly the wrong guy.

The reference to me which you plan to insert in your forthcoming article is quite all right with me as it stands now.

The lions want you to know that they are lions of leisure, with no duties whatever, and that they are highly cultured lions. (They know the Latin verses came from you, because they recognized your handwriting and the Princeton postmark.) At first they thought the verses meant:

We, the lion and the lioness!
How they mitigate the suave
________offices in the nearby
________skyscrapers!

So of course they were badly disillusioned when they got out their Latin dictionaries.

Seriously, what is the source? One of our staff collects verse about the Library and would like to know. If they are original, congratulations! They are lovely.

This is only to thank you for your final information about the Sieur Guillaume de Vienne et de Sainte-Croix, which is exactly what I wanted (since the gentleman's father died as early as 1360, he must have been at least seventy in 1430, which precludes his identification with the sitter of a portrait that in my opinion represents somebody else) and to offer you my best wishes for your future in what appears to be the new home of the Cataloging Department. I am happy to hear that my little distich met with your approval. I must admit that it is original and that the use of the short “a” in “lea” at the end of the pentameter is a little hard; it can, however, be justified by a small number of parallels even in Ovid (“Ita” or “Iove” is in an analogous position).

In the hope that your article on the Tarochi will survive the surgery of the editors, as well as the ministrations of the printers, I am, with all good wishes,

Many thanks for your letter as well as for the two pamphlets, with both of which I am well pleased.

Concerning the little collection of references to the New York Public Library in recent literature, I am, needless to say, extremely flattered to be included as a poet (and not as an author active in children’s literature), an honor of which I would never have dreamt. I notice with amusement that ten of the thirty-seven poets included make reference to the lions, which seem to exert a peculiar attraction on the public mind not only because of their inherent beauty (which is considerable) but also on account of the legend attached to them. This legend, incidentally, deserves some folkloristic research. I remember that an analogous story was told in my student days of the big obelisk in Munich, which were supposed to shake under the same conditions as the lions are supposed to roar, and I believe that both these stories (and there may be more in other localities) can be traced back to the legend surrounding the Bocca della Verità in Santa Maria di Cosmedin at Rome, which is of very respectable age and attributes the invention of such miraculous tests of chastity to none other than Virgil.

Your article on the tarot cards, as it now stands, meets all reasonable requirements, the strongest point (in an art historian’s mind) being the identity of the Hermit with Petrarch’s Father Time. The only very small objection is that in your caption you identify the central motif of the Triumph of Eternity as “God the Father.” This is a heresy which I hope will not count against you at the Last Judgment. You should have said “the Trinity” (which in this particular case is represented by God the Father holding the crucified Christ, the dove hovering above the latter’s head). Since the three persons of the Trinity are consubstantial and coeternal, even single figures representing the deity in Christian art must be interpreted as the triune God; God the Father, the First Person, occurs only in such “explicit” Trinities as that in your miniature or else in scenes involving a dialogue between the First Person and the Second.

Since this is the only flaw I can discover, I think you will be absolved even before a tribunal of art historians.

With my renewed thanks and all good wishes,
Sincerely yours,

Erwin Panofsky

[scan 0000, not dated but obviously after the move to 53rd St]
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT .
Cataloging Office
20 West 53rd Street
New York 19, New York

Professor Erwin Panofsky
School of Historical Studies
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey

Dear Professor Panofsky,

Your delightful letter must not go unanswered--it gave our whole staff so much pleasure and amusement. It even developed that some of them had never heard of the special talents of our Lions, much less about their rivals in other cities. I am so pleased to have your blessing on the article as it stands in print, with the one heretical exception, which I humbly recant. With best wishes, and hopes for many more good books from your pen.

But some rather interesting obiter dicta can be found in A. Warburg’s Gessammelte Schriften, Berlin and Leipzig, 1932 (see Index), and a rather good article (at least I thought so) by H. Brockhaus is found in the Miscellanee di Storia d’Arte in onore di I. B. Supino, Florence, 1933, p. 397 ff.

... .-) ... they spend a lot of time for polite talking.

Panofsky:

But some rather interesting obiter dicta can be found in A. Warburg’s Gessammelte Schriften, Berlin and Leipzig, 1932 (see Index), and a rather good article (at least I thought so) by H. Brockhaus is found in the Miscellanee di Storia d’Arte in onore di I. B. Supino, Florence, 1933, p. 397 ff.

Here is more correspondence, now pertaining to the book, after March of 1956, to the end in March 1967, one year after the book was published and one year before Panofsky's death. Panofsky saved not only Moakley's letters but also the carbons she sent of draft pages of the book, apparently in 1959. These are virtually identical with what appears in the book, with one notable exception: she completely changed the section on the Popess.

[Scan 0032]
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
Catalog Office
20 West 53rd Street
New York 19, New York
September 17, 1956

I have only just today returned from vacation, and the blue Monday is considerably lightened by the sight of your letter on my desk. Thank you for recommending the Tarot article to Professor Meiss. I am sending him a copy of it in this mail, and asking him to let me know about the early set of cards you mention. We will get started right away on the hunt for Jean Cueillete. I almost hope our experts will fail so that I can have the fun of rooting around in the Forty-second Street stacks again.

Sincerely yours,

Gertrude Moakley

[scan 0033; this one and the next have nothing to do with tarot but may be of interest. The one by Panofsky is a very blurry carbon copy, while the one by Moakley is very crisp. It seems somehow clear that these letters were all saved by Panofsky and come from his archives. ]
October 15, 1956

Miss Gertrude Moakley
Cataloging Office
New York Public Library
20 West 53rd Street
New York 19, N. Y.

Dear Miss Moakley,

This is only to take a load off my mind--and, I hope, off yours. By sheer accident I found an article on the entire Cueillete family which answers all the questions involved in my particular problem. So I am sorry to have bothered you about the gentleman in question (in fact, he has split in half in the process, like a bacterium), and this is only, as it were, to call off such hounds as you may have put on Jean Cueillete's track in the meantime. I do, however, appreciate your willingness to start the hunt and with your permission will not fail to appeal to you whenever another occasion offers.

In the meantime I am, with best regards,

Very sincerely yours,

Erwin Panofsky

[Scan 0034]
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT
Cataloging Office
20 West 53rd Street
New York 18, New York
October 17, 1956

Your letter came just in the nick of time, for I was planning to spend this evening at the main Library really digging for Jean Cueillete. I am so glad you have already found what you wanted to know about him.

Yes, do please let me know whenever we can help you again. Next time I will do a better job of starting the hounds. For Jean Cueillete I sent an inter-office memo to Dr. McDonald, and when I called him today to tell him the search was off he informed me that it had never reached him. So all the searching we did was my own poor efforts. I shall be a good deal slower now that we are in this building, for I can't slip off into the Forty-second Street stacks in odd moments as I used to do. But if you are willing to wait I shall be only too glad to share in your interesting research.

Sincerely yours,

Gertrude Moakley

You may be interested to know that in ^Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy" by Grillot de Givry (New York? Frederick Publications, 1954) on page 56 there is a reproduction (greatly reduced) of Durer's The Four Witches" and also of Israel van Meckenem's "The Four Witches” which is almost an exact copy, in reverse, of the Durer picture. On the ball over the witches' heads in the latter the letters are I (or B A, instead of 0 G B ea in the Darer. I thougt this might give some clue as to the meaning of the letters, which you mentioned in your book on Durer.

[scan 0035; in handwriting at the top, probably Panofsky’s: “Around July 17, 1959: No”]
34 Bethune Street
New York 14, New York
July 13, 1959

Dear Professor Panofsky,

I hope Mr. Lowry has asked you to write the text for a book of colored reproductions of the trumps from the Visconti-Sforsa tarocchi. Before you say “No” to him let me call your attention to the following things, which a casual search of the literature might not reveal to you. This set (the trumps are partly in the Morgan Library and partly in the Accademia Carrara at Bergamo) is actually a nearly complete set of tarocchi (only the Devil, Tower, and Knight of Coins are missing) corresponding card for and to the modern tarot or tarocchi. Through bad mislabeling, this fact has been concealed. Good studies of playing cards have always corrected these errors, but without a special interest in tarocchi their full extent has not been realised. I cannot send you my photos of the trumps, for I have sent them to Mr. Lowry. Instead let me list them, using their fifteenth-century names (and fifteenth-century order)

Such interesting things can be found out about them. For instance, Il Bagatino is the Carnival King having his last meal before execution, and was a clown of the later commedia dell'arte. The Empress and Emperor have on their robes the three-ring device of Francesco Sforza and the ducal crown of Milan. Their eagle is the single-headed imperial eagle which the Visconti quartered with the biscia. The Hanged Man is suffering the punishment of the recreant knight; he is being “baffled.” Once started you would find so much! None of this has ever been printed.

Dear Professor Panofsky, Since I so afraid you may turn Mr. Lowry down on the tarocchi proposition, I have continued work on it myself. I only have the rest of July and August in which to work; after that I shall be too busy to do much about it.

While typing, I have made extra carbons for you. I want you to see what a pitiful thing it is going to be if you don't do it, also I want to try to show you how much there is of iconographic interest in the cards. I have told Mr. Lowry that you would produce a glorious book on the subject; I could only produce a fairly attractive book. As to the long introduction the work cries for, I have neither the ability nor the time to do anything at all worthy of the subject. I do think I deserve some credit for noticing that the Visconti-Sforza cards correspond exactly to the cards of a modern tarocchi pack, that they represent a triumphal procession on the last day of Carnival, and that Il Bagatino is the doomed Carnival King. Possibly thera are other things I could contribute which would give you a slight headstart on the subject. I have on my desk Arte Lombardo dai Visconti agli Sforza, the catalog of a recent exhibit at the Palazzo Reale In Milan. It contains much interesting material on the cards, and it seems practically certain that they are the work of Bonifacio Bembo. Unfortunately it quickly went out of print (I could not buy a copy for myself) and you may not have access to it. So I am keeping the Library's copy for awhile, and think I can arrange for an interlibrary loan to the library of the Institute for your use, if you want it. I don't know how much recognition this help would be worth; if it amounted to having my name in smaller type below yours on the title page I would be extremely happy, and would be satisfied with perhaps a dozen copies of the darling book as economic compensation.

Oh, do please write the dear thing!

Sincerely,

Gertrude Moakley

Don't send the carbons back; if you don't want them throw them away.

[scan 0037, on a 3x5 card of the type used in card catalogs]
Here is more of my attempt to woo you for the Visconti-Sforza trumps. I am beginning to like writing about the trumps, though it won’t be so easy to find anything about some of them. I would rather like to do the trumps and a little piece about the Ludus Triumphorum whose cards became the trumps of the tarocchi and the minchiate, if you would do all the rest. My attempts to write about actual triumphs are lifeless in the extreme. G. Moakley 34 Bethune St. New York 14, N. Y.

[Handwritten, in probably Moakley’s hand] Throw all away if you aren’t interested

[scans 0038-0044 missing. Scans 0045-0046 her notes on the Bagatino, identical to what is in her printed book on p 63, except that in the latter she has added a reference for her statement about what Bagatt means in modern Milanese dialect.]

[Scan 0047 is her exposition on the Imperatrice, identical in content (although sometimes with clearer wording) to what is said in the book (p. 70), except that some of the part on the device of the diamond ring was moved to the chapter on the Visconti and Sforza families. In the process one detail was lost. In the typescript she says “Sometimes there is a diamond ring at the tip of each rib in the dragon’s wings, or a whole chain of rings may be strung around its neck.” On p. 38 of the book she says, “The Sforza achievement [meanng the victory over Terzo] is sometimes shown with the diamond ring repeated many times, either as a whole chain of rings, or as a separate ring at the tip of each rib in the dragon's bat-like wings.” The neck is not mentioned.]

[Scan 0048 is her notes on the Imperatrice. They are the same as in the book.]

[Scan 0049 and 0050 are on the Traditore, corresponding, with occasional changes in word order, to her exposition of that card in the book (as opposed to the notes). The ony difference is that in the typescript she adds to the last sentence, after a comma: “and more fun for the crowd that watched the parade”. (This part indeed should be omitted, in my opinion, because she found no evidence that the cards reflected depictins in any actual parade.)

[Scan 0051, 0052, 0053, and 0054 are her notes on the Traditore. I see no changes from typescript to book.]

[Scans 0055 and 0056 are her exposition on the Imperadore. I see no changes.]

[Scan 0057 is her notes on the Imperadore. I see no changes.]

[Scan 0058 is her exposition on the Papessa. It is completely different from what is in the book, so I give it here.]
IV. La Papessa
The Popess wears the triple papal crown, and has the a cross-staff in her right hand. A white wimple and frayed white veil top her brown Franciscan habit, which is very different from the regalia of Pope Joan as she is usually pictured.

In later tarocohi packs she is the second of the trumps, the special enemy of the Carnival King. It is likely that she took on the character of Lady Lent, who is his enemy in some of the Carnival contrasti. In some seventeenth-century Swiss tarots she is replaced by the Spanish Captain of the commedia dell'arte, and in some of the tarots of southern France she becomes Juno.

There is just a hint of the sorrowful Juno Memoria in most pictures of Pope Joan. She always has the veil of that Juno, and the book of memory to remind her of her sins. There is a hint, too, of the Madonna Intelligenza of the Fideli d'Amore, the widow whose husband, the Pope, had died to the spiritual life by devoting himself to material interests. She suggests also the Sophia of the Gnostics, the female aspect of God. By her curiosity she sank so low that at last Simon Magus found her in a brothel at Tyre, incarnate in a woman named Helen.

[Scan 0059 is her notes on the Papessa. It is completely different from the book, so I give it here.]
IV. La Papessa.
It was Mr. Leo M. Mlade [?], of the Genealogical Division of the New York Public Library, who pointed out the Franciscan habit of the Popess. I had not noticed that she is differently dressed. Ha also showed me that the empress’s three rings were diamond rings, and found the device assigned to Cosimo de' Medici; and furthermore showed me, in the tenth trump card, that the figures are variously adorned with tails and asses’ ears.

[Reference. for Juno Memoria (Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods), Madonna Intelligenza (something of Mircea Eliade’s, I think), Sophia (Jonas, The Gnostic Religion? Religion of the Gnostics? I must get from notes located elsewhere and rewrite this page.]

For the Spanish Captain who replaces the Popess, see the British Museum's catalog of its playing cards [exact citation elsewhere; must look up and copy] under Tarots, Flemish. These were “Swiss tarots” made in Brussels. They don't call him "the Spulah Captain, but he is "Captain [something like the Captain of the Commedia.]

[Scan 0060 is a handwritten letter on her personal stationery]

MISS GERTRUDE MOAKLEY
34 Bethune St.
New York 14, N.Y.
Telephone CHelsea 2-4998 [my guess; the numbers are very blurred]
July 22, 1959

Dear Professor Panofsky,

I must apologize for the torrent of correspondence which is already on its way to you. I have been wild with delight ever since Mr. Lowry (he represents Basic Books and the Readers’ Subscription) phoned me out of a clear sky to ask me what tarocchi trumps of museum quality I could recommend for reproduction in color. The Visconti-Sforza trumps (photos of them) had been my constant companions for five years, and of course they are the finest. They will make a magnificent book, and you could furnish such a magnificent text for it. It would just flow out of your mind without any special research – the interest of the cards is that they are examples of miniature paintings done for that wonderful family, not that they are playing cards. I am still making extra carbons for you in the hope that you will change your mind.

Mr. Lowry must have addressed you indirectly somehow – you will be hearing from him eventually. Do say yes.

Late this Spring the New York Public Library will publish the book on the tarot cards of Bonifacio Bembo which you WOULD NOT write and which I therefore had to write myself.

You are mentioned decorously in the preface in acknowledgment of your help, and I think the editor will send you a copy of the book.

Is the address to which I send this the right one to which to send the book? [Handwritten:] I got it from the Directory of American Scholars.

If you are too busy to reply, and the address is correct, just don’t answer.

It is only during the last ten years or so that the so-called Visconti-Sforza tarot cards, of which the Morgan Library in New York owns the more interesting, have been definitely attributed to Bembo.So this little amateur picture-book of mine will, unfortunately, be the introduction in English of the attribution.

Sincerely and gratefully,

Gertrude Moakley [handwritten only]

I retired from the New York Public Library a year ago, and now take occasional assignments in bibliographical research. For YOU I will gladly take on a few at no fee.

[scan 0062, the last]
March 9, 1967

Miss Gertrude Moakley
411 West 22nd Street
New York, New York 10011

Dear Miss Moakley,

So at long last the child has teen born and a very healthy and promising child it is! Knowing so deplorably little about the history of playing cards, I am full of admiration for the thoroughness of your research and for the acuteness with which you have solved so many apparently insurmountable problems of interpretation. It would be presumptuous for me to offer any further suggestions, let along criticisms - except for a tiny little detail which struck me on p. 87, where reference might have been made to the fact that the formula "duce virtute comite Fortuna" is not so much “a corresponding idea” but one of the basic convictions of the Renaissance concerning the relations between Fortune and Virtue and that the phrase itself comes from Cicero’s letter to [handwritten to end of sentence;] L. Plancus (Fam. X, 3, 2).

Otherwise, I find nothing to quarrel with and can express only my admiration and my gratitude for your acknowledgement of some little helpful hints which really and truly would not have deserved to be mentioned.